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Alan Simpson goes 'Gangnam style'

Former Sen. Alan Simpson has come up with a new way to get his message out about the fiscal cliff — he dances to Gangnam Style in a video.

In the new video for “The Can Kicks Back,” the 81-year-old former Wyoming Republican senator tells millennials: “Stop Instagramming your breakfast and tweeting your first world problems, and getting on YouTube so you can see Gangnam Style, and start using those precious social media skills to go out and sign people up on this baby.”

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Fiscal cliff: A primer

Simpson then does his best “horse” dance as he imitates the South Korean performer PSY, whose Gangnam Style video has been viewed more than 850 million times on YouTube.

What’s the story behind the video?

”We pulled up the YouTube video on our laptop and the three of us started practicing for a little bit,” TCKB field director Nick Troiano, 23, told POLITICO. “He related it to growing up in Wyoming and riding horses.”

Troiano and TCKB executive director Ryan Schoenike, 30, filmed the video last Wednesday in their D.C. office after Simpson accepted their invitation to help with their cause. Simpson took a dance break between a breakfast with The Christian Science Monitor and Capitol Hill meetings.

“Little did all of those important people know what he did in between,” Schoenike told POLITICO. “He’s got a great sense of humor. We weren’t sure if was going to do it. It’s great because no one is really communicating to our generation right now about this issue and that’s the goal with this campaign.”

Added Troiano: “We think the national debt is the greatest challenge facing our generation. And we realized that we need to break through to young people somehow because the debt isn’t the sexiest issue that is out there.”

TCKB is a nonpartisan campaign targeting millennials to fix the national debt, according to the campaign’s website.

Troiano and Schoenike said they’ve also reached out to Erskine Bowles, but declined to offer whether a future video is in the works. TCKB receives some of its funding from Simpson and Bowles-backed The Campaign to Fix the Debt, which aims to urge the government to make tough choices about the national debt. Simpson and Bowles are authors of the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, which has become a political hot topic amid for lawmakers looking to lower the debt.

Readers' Comments (4)

The Can Kicks Back is mostly an old rich white guys' gambit - raised from the rubble of the spectacularly failed Americans Elect, and funded by corporate CEOs and Wall Street billionaires such as Pete Peterson - to persuade young people to support kicking Granny into the street through austerity cuts to Medicare and Social Security in order to insure the budget won't get balanced on the backs of the 1%. To better understand the players behind The Can Kicks Back see: http://aetransparency.blogspot...

This Simpson video nicely illustrates the vacuity of TCCB's approach and its disdain for the thought processes of young people.

One budget cut that is simply being ignored by all Congresspersons is to eliminate the parallel universe of health benefits & retirement plans of the U.S. Legislators, so that the laws they impose on the citizens applies to them as well. Bet you that whiplash would bring these politicians back to their common sense.

It is an ongoing injustice that Congresspersons are exempt from the laws that they pass for the citizens to live by. Once again, the 1% prove that they live in an economic geodesic bubble which excludes the 99% Middle Class.

Adam Young - "One budget cut that is simply being ignored by all Congresspersons is to eliminate the parallel universe of health benefits & retirement plans of the U.S. Legislators, so that the laws they impose on the citizens applies to them as well."

ObamaCare already applies to members of congress and their staffs. It's directly written into the law that they pick their plans off an exchange.

Why should we expect them to go without employer sponsored health insurance though? That is nonsense. Nothing in ObamaCare takes away employer sponsored insurance. The fact is that it puts mandates in place to ensure that doesn't happen.